The use of magnetic heads in reading and writing from magnetic recording media is well known. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,355,727 an improved recording head is disclosed in which a recording tip is positioned on a magnetic core shielded by a concentric magnetic shield. Additionally, thin film inductive transducers have been used to read and write to magnetic media. Of particular interest are the thin film single gap heads disclosed in "A Thin Film Head for Perpendicular Recording," J. App. Phys 53(3) March 1982; "Thin Film Head Study for Perpendicular Recording" IEEE Transactions on Magnetics Vol. MAG-17 No. 6 Nov. 81; D. P. Gregg, "Deposited Film Transducing Apparatus and Method of Producing the Apparatus", U.S. Pat. No. 3,344,237, Sept. 26, 1967; and J. Lazzari and I. Melnick, "Integrated Magnetic Recording HeadS", IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-7, No. 1, March 1971.
Unlike the single gap thin film heads, a double gap thin film inductive transducer is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,404,609. A three pole tip head is provided for perpendicular recording which has claimed advantages over the single gap or double pole-tip head.
However, none of the prior art read/write heads write a vertical medium at a distance and, in particular, a double sided thick substrate rigid disk. Accordingly, it is an object of the present to provide a novel thin film inductive transducer that provides a means of writing to rigid disks at a distance. A further object of the invention is to provide a transducer which can also read at a greater medium-to-element distance than prior art devices with a higher signal-to-noise ratio and better lineal resolution.